6

Inside the Union Hall

In any workplace conflict, employers retain the ultimate power of dispensing or withholding employment. Workers’ ability to modulate that power rests, in part, on the scale of the opposition’s resources and their own internal organization. In the decentralized world of construction, building tradesmen held a critical edge. Local and regional employers had difficulty marshaling adequate financial and political clout to wage all-out war on building trades unions. The highly skilled nature of the work reinforced the rough parity of the contending sides. Carpenters and other craftsmen relied on the leverage of their indispensable savvy to drag grudging contractors to the bargaining table. From time to time builders dealt their employees severe setbacks, but they were unable to extinguish permanently the flame of unionism.

For all the advantages built into the situation, the successes of the Carpenters Union in its first forty years rested on the complete organization of the trade. The presence of qualified nonunion carpenters always returned the upper hand to the contractors. As long as the people who had the skills to put a structure together were organized, building employers were forced to negotiate with the union. Union control over the labor supply was a necessary but not quite sufficient condition for success. Locals survived and prevailed because carpenters wanted to join the UBCJA. They welcomed the benefits, enjoyed the internal life, and considered union membership part and parcel of the identity of an accomplished mechanic. The union card was as crucial to an early-twentieth-century carpenter as a complete set of tools. He needed the card in closed-shop towns to practice his trade. He needed it in every town to be considered a tradesman. By the time of World War I, it was a matter of common wisdom that “the craftsman without a card is a man without a trade.”

Founder P. J. McGuire’s conception of the United Brotherhood combined elements of craft pride, beneficial unionism, and social vision. Locals wrote sick funds and accident and death benefits into their by-laws as soon as they were chartered. These insurance schemes tided members over the humps of a dangerous and unstable working life and added immeasurably to the appeal of the organization. The extent of the funds belied the infancy of the unions. In 1904, Boston’s Local 33 distributed $1,800 in sick and accident benefits. McGuire challenged impatient members who criticized the elaborate benefits system. In 1899, Lynn carpenters actually withdrew from the Brotherhood for a period of five years. Local 108 members objected to the 20 cents monthly per capita tax and argued that “too much money was being spent on death and disability benefits and too little for organizing purposes.” McGuire disagreed. He stressed the connection between the insurance funds and broader labor concerns of social change. The benefits, he claimed, “hold enough men together to keep the machinery in motion” in slack times, so that when work picked up and the larger “labor question” could be faced directly, “these men will find an organization all in order for them.”¹

Despite his emphasis on beneficial measures, McGuire did not equate trade unions with insurance societies. Labor organizations, he believed, had a grander purpose—they needed to play a role in the development of an American working-class political culture. In speeches and writings, he contrasted the cultural poverty of workers in the United States with the public libraries, art galleries, and labor parties available to the European workingman. “This is a country,” he told a U.S. Senate committee, “that is chiefly intent on making money.” He urged locals to set up libraries, train members in the art of public speaking, and sponsor debates on the political and economic issues of the day. “What better field for the discussions of these grave problems than the Trade Unions . . . these primary schools of industrial thought?”²

Massachusetts carpenters took McGuire’s advice to heart. Boston carpenters joined with the Knights of Labor to set up a reading room for labor literature in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Boston in 1887. Social reformers such as Martha Avery regularly addressed the weekly union meetings. The Worcester locals installed a reading room in their Carpenters Hall. Their meetings combined union business, singing, instrumental performances, and educational programs. Greenfield’s carpenters held monthly “smoke talks” devoted to political discussions. The Springfield District Council had a standing committee on books and magazines that purchased works of interest for union members.³

Debate and discussion occasionally moved into the electoral arena. A number of union carpenters stumped for political office in the 1890s, a period of heightened labor political activism. W. J. Shields, a national UBCJA officer as well as president of Local 33, ran for lieutenant-governor on the populist People’s party ticket in 1891. The depression of 1893 made a legislative orientation even more attractive as traditional collective bargaining brought few or no gains. Carpenters and other unionists turned to radical political initiatives, hoping their candidates could speak for working-class interests on the federal, state, and local levels. In early 1894, the Boston Carpenters District Council issued a call to the membership for increased political and economic discussion and pushed the Building Trades Council to endorse political parties outside the Democratic and Republican two-party structure. The BTC also announced its support for the nationalization of gas and electric utilities and the communications industry.⁴

Following the lead of the building trades, a number of Boston area labor organizations met in April of 1894 and formed the Workingmen’s Political League. With the backing of the Massachusetts AFL, the League drew up a mildly socialist platform that highlighted the working-class elements of the People’s party programs. The WPL nominated Local 33’s Harry Lloyd for the Boston School Committee in 1895 and built enough support that Lloyd lost by just 662 votes. As the depression eased, interest in labor candidates dwindled. Carpenters returned to workplace-based strategies to improve their lot. Nonetheless, contrary to the standard image of conservative building trades unions’ hostility to any kind of political activity, Massachusetts carpenters never gave up a strong tradition of involvement, or for that matter, developing qualified candidates. In 1909, for example, John Potts of Local 33 followed in the footsteps of Shields and Lloyd, running a strong race for the Boston Common Council.⁵

The locals took up light as well as grave matters. Committees organized oyster suppers, clam bakes, and turkey dinners that drew hundreds of members and their families. Whatever other events a local sponsored, Labor Day was the annual occasion for carpenters to parade their collective pride before their fellow unionists and townspeople. Labor Day marches and picnics were giant affairs—thirteen thousand in Boston in 1896; one thousand in Lawrence the same year; ten thousand in Holyoke in 1902; and forty-five hundred in Brockton in 1903. Inevitably, union carpenters formed one of if not the largest contingent in the parade.

Who were these men who marched on Labor Day? Where did the carpenters of Massachusetts come from? Like most American workers, they were the descendants of immigrants. But like most skilled workers, relatively few were immigrants themselves. The census report of 1850 shows that fully two-thirds of Boston’s carpenters were born in Massachusetts or other parts of the United States. Seventeen percent came from Ireland, a reflection of the large community in Boston that fled the Irish famines of the 1840s. Another 15 percent were of British North American origin, primarily arrivals from the Maritime Provinces of Canada.⁶

In 1850, the Canadian connection was just a trickle. The collapse of New Brunswick’s timber industry in the previous decade had dispatched unemployed loggers and woodcutters southward. Boston’s modest building boom in this period provided a welcome haven for men accustomed to working with wood. That was only the beginning. Over the next century the trickle cascaded into a regular pipeline of carpenters from New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland. The volume ebbed and flowed with the state of the extensive wood products industries in the Atlantic Provinces, but the stream never completely dried. From the days of the shipbuilding slump in the 1870s right up to the present, carpenters have deserted destitute Maritime villages in favor of the construction jobs in the cities and towns of Massachusetts. Ernest Landry grew up in a small settlement near Moncton, New Brunswick. “If they come from Canada,” he observes of his fellow travelers, “it seems that they’re carpenters.”

Unlike European immigrants, the English-speaking Canadians had little trouble with their new homeland’s language and culture. Furthermore, the distance was small, allowing regular contact and frequent return visits. Not all the Canadians spoke English, however. A significant number of the immigrants were French speaking. By 1873, an estimated two hundred thousand French Canadians lived in New England, concentrated in a few towns such as the “Canadian centers” of Fall River, Holyoke, and Worcester. The French communities grew rapidly, particularly during the great migration of 1890 to 1893. They came from Quebec and the French areas of the Maritimes. Moncton, Landry’s hometown, was mostly French speaking. Whether farmers, loggers, or fishermen, Landry recalls, the people he grew up with seemed to have sawdust in their veins. In the summer, they built and repaired barns, roofed, shingled, and put up additions. During the long winters, they made wooden strawberry and blueberry crates. Landry’s impressions are confirmed by statistical surveys. According to a study of French Canadians in Massachusetts, an unusually high 6 percent of all French Canadian immigrants in the commonwealth in 1895 were employed as carpenters and joiners.⁷

The linguistic and cultural differences made social integration much more complex for French Canadians than for their English-speaking countrymen. The Québecois who moved into the shoe and textile mill towns lived in insular neighborhoods retaining their customs and traditions. The ever-present option of a return to the nearby Canadian homestead worked against the kinds of assimilationist tendencies that were slightly more pronounced among non–English-speaking European immigrants. As a result, many native New Englanders viewed French Canadians with enormous suspicion. Their perceptions were reinforced by the common reluctance to exchange Canadian for U.S. citizenship. In addition, factory workers feared the wage-cutting threat of a new and sizable community of potential competitors.

Anti-French nativism received a boost with Carroll Wright’s infamous 1881 remark, labeling French-Canadian immigrants “the Chinese of the Eastern States.” In his annual report, Wright, who was the chief of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Massachusetts, suggested, “Their purpose is merely to sojourn a few years as aliens, touching us only at a single point, that of work, and, when they have gathered out of us what will satisfy their ends, to get them away to whence they came, and bestow it there. They are a horde of industrial invaders.”⁸ Wright’s comments hit a highly sensitive nerve. In the ensuing uproar, leaders of the French-Canadian community forced the bureau chief to hold public hearings on the subject and print their counterpoints in the following year’s Statistics of Labor report. Wright’s views were far from uncommon. Even unionists in mill towns wondered if such a “sordid and low people,” as Wright described them, could forgo a cultural clannishness and forge ties with other factory workers. The notion of an “industrial invader” fed into a stereotype of French Canadians as indifferent or hostile to unionism.

The experience of Massachusetts carpenters’ locals refutes the antiunion albatross. The Brotherhood organized separate ethnic locals across the country in an effort to reach out to immigrant workers. Springfield Local 96 was not only the first French local in the commonwealth, it was also the first carpenters’ local of any kind in the Springfield area when it was chartered in 1885. Springfield’s English-speaking carpenters did not organize until eleven years later. Very rarely, tensions arose over the French locals’ willingness to accept lower wages than the English-speaking unions. Much more often, the French locals spearheaded some of the most militant labor struggles in the state. By the early 1900s, French locals had been established in Holyoke, Chicopee, Worcester, Fall River, Lowell, Leominster, and Taunton. Ties to the old country both helped and hurt organizing efforts. Carpenters freely drew on prolabor traditions in Quebec, inviting Canadian union leaders and sympathetic politicians, such as Member of Parliament Alphonse Verville, to speak at their meetings. On the other hand, the virtually open borders guaranteed an influx of nonunion carpenters each spring. The French locals constantly pressed the national Brotherhood office and the Massachusetts State Council of Carpenters to hire French-speaking organizers to bring in the unorganized men.

From its inception, the Brotherhood created foreign-language local unions to organize immigrant carpenters. By 1894, 70 of the national union’s 597 locals were ethnic unions—48 German, 9 French, and a scattering of Bohemian, Scandinavian, Jewish, Dutch, and Polish.⁹ Massachusetts contributed more than just its French locals. In the early 1900s, Portuguese carpenters won a charter in Fall River and Jewish locals functioned in Boston and Chelsea. The by-laws of the Boston local offered members the choice of using English or Yiddish at meetings, but required English for all officials records and correspondence. The ethnic locals buffered the immigrant carpenter’s contact with an alien environment. Unfamiliar with the language and daily patterns of his new American compatriots, the immigrant carpenter relied on the cultural solidarity of his local union to help him find jobs and make sense of his new world. Even in towns without separate ethnic locals, large blocs of single nationalities within an English-speaking union performed the same function.

Ellis Blomquist’s father was a construction supervisor and member of the carpenters’ guild in Finland. Fleeing to avoid conscription into the Russian army in 1914, he brought his family first to Canada and then to the lumber camps of Massachusetts. Through contacts in the Fitchburg Carpenters Union (at the time half-Finnish, according to Tom Phalen), he quickly became a Brotherhood member. “My father got a job with a Worcester firm,” remembers Blomquist. “The superintendent liked him so much that he bought a Finnish-American dictionary, and at lunch hour, he was teaching my father English.” But even without a friendly supervisor, strong ethnic bonds generally eased the newcomer’s path into the industry. “There were a lot of Finnish people,” says Blomquist with a chuckle. “So my father could always get along by being paired up with another square-head.”

The ethnic locals faded in importance as the members assimilated into the dominant American culture. The children who followed their footsteps into the carpentry trade no longer needed the cultural buffer of a foreign-language union. Most of the ethnic locals maintained their charters while gradually switching to English for union business. A few retained their original flavor but only at the expense of new blood. Boston’s Jewish Local 157 kept its ethnic identity into the 1960s. Most of its members, however, were in their sixties. The youngest were in their late forties. Their sons and nephews either joined the more vital regular locals or moved to fill openings in the professional and business world. A 1960 study considered the state of this Boston ethnic local that did not really die, but rather faded away.

Many of these older carpenters have resigned themselves to working only on the less arduous aspects of the trade—e.g. on wooden buildings and alterations. In fact, some of the less sturdy members are not even interested in “concrete” jobs, or anything that requires climbing. Almost one-half of these carpenters do jobbing on their own—mainly residential housing repairs. Often three or four men will form a partnership, and they are satisfied with “as much as they can make.”¹⁰

In 1972, Local 157—little more than a paper organization by then—was consolidated into Local 33.

Immigrants still form an important element within the trade. In Massachusetts, drywall installers are often first- or second-generation French Canadians or (in the southeastern part of the state) Portuguese. Migration patterns, today as before, depend on family and village ties. Though the current number of Irish newcomers in Boston hardly measures up to the great migrations of yesteryear, most carpenters arriving from Ireland find their way to Local 67, the union with the greatest number of Irish members. For most nationalities, the first carpenter to “make it” invariably serves as an inspiration and contact for those who follow. Virtually every carpenter hired by one present-day drywall firm in the Fall River–New Bedford area comes from the same small town in Portugal, a fact attributable to the drawing power of the Portuguese owner. Today’s immigrants, however, must depend on community agencies to cushion the culture shock. The internal life of the modern union has little room for the small minority of foreign-language-speaking members. The tradition of ethnic locals in the Brotherhood has long passed.

For native and foreign-born alike, the unions were more than collective bargaining agents. They were the social center of carpenters’ lives. Living memories cannot reconstruct events dating back to the beginning of the century, but today’s retirees recall a cultural vitality that continued well into the 1920s and 30s. John MacKinnon joined Boston’s Local 67 in 1921. He remembers the big crowds at the Friday night meetings that stayed on into the night after the union business was finished, talking, arguing, and playing cards.

The union used to be a wonderful place to go to a meeting back in the days when I joined. We had some smart men. It was interesting to hear the conversations and the work that was discussed. You got up at the meeting if you had anything to say and you expressed yourself.

Tom Phalen joined the Fitchburg local in 1927. He was struck by the membership’s general knowledge.

Everyone was a parliamentarian. You didn’t open your mouth without somebody jumping down your throat, saying “you’re out of order or you got to do it this way or that way. “Everyone knew the by-laws, everyone knew the Robert’s Rules of Order.

Phalen points out that the union both educated and entertained the members at a time when workers had few other outlets. “In the twenties and thirties,” he says, “the old-timers didn’t have television or anything. They were always at the meetings, and they knew what they were talking about. They would talk union day and night.”

“Talking union” meant carpenters first, the combined building trades second, and the entire labor movement third. The carpenters were the largest of the building trades unions and the building trades anchored every Central Labor Union in Massachusetts, even in the mill towns. The strength of the turn-of-the-century Massachusetts labor movement was tangible. Workers of differing industries were connected through their organizations and provided crucial support for one another. In his 1901 novel The Evolution of a Trade Unionist, Boston labor editor Frank Foster described the excitement of a “cosmopolitan” Central Labor Union gathering. Carpenters, bricklayers, printers, cigar makers, and dozens of other craft workers of all nationalities convened regularly.

There were radicals and conservatives, cranks and common-sense men, the diffident and the assertive, the wit and the bore, the cynical and the enthusiast, the fault-finder and the organizer, the impetuous and the self-contained, men who rarely spoke and those who delighted in the sound of their own voices. . . . There was no question too small or too large to wrestle with. [The CLU] tackled with equal zest the issue of Cuban independence or that of whether a barber painting his own shop infringed upon the jurisdiction of the craftsmen of the painters’ calling.¹¹

Carpenters raised money for coal handlers, typefounders, shoe cutters, and textile workers. They patronized grocers with union clerks and helped win a 1902 Boston brewery workers’ strike by boycotting nonunion beer. They smoked union cigars, shopped at union stores, wore union clothing, and ate at union restaurants. Parents passed on union traditions to sons and daughters. “Nothing came into our house that didn’t have a union label,” says Oscar Pratt. Paul Weiner had the same experience. “You’d go into a store to buy a shirt and it had to have a union label. We were brought up that way.” Tom Harrington remembers his childhood household as being “strictly union.” The traditions traveled from the home to the job site. MacKinnon says of his fellow carpenters, “we always bought union overalls.”

A system of rules and regulations kept the job sites “strictly union.” Business agents were empowered to “bring charges” against any member who violated union by-laws or trade rules. In late 1906, a rash of nine-hour jobs cropped up in Springfield. The city’s Carpenters District Council ordered agent W. J. LaFrancis to crack down on offenders. Within three weeks, LaFrancis identified eight union members who had agreed to work the extra hour. The Council filed charges, held hearings, found all eight guilty, and fined them $15 each. Locals penalized members for piecework, lumping, accepting subunion wages, and working alongside nonunion carpenters. Complaints against members from other unions were considered seriously. When the Springfield Painters Union informed the Carpenters District Council that two UBC members had hired nonunion painters to work on their own property, the Council promptly issued suspended fines. Travelers from outside a union’s geographical jurisdiction who failed to buy a 25-cent working button were customarily fined from $2 to $5. The penalties for transgressions could be severe. In 1908, LaFrancis discovered that member C. Junior had accepted a nine-hour open-shop job. For the double crime of working alongside nonunion men and for nine hours a day, Junior was ordered to pay $30—nearly two weeks earnings.¹²

As membership grew, union business agents were hard pressed to patrol every job in their areas. A 1907 Springfield District Council by-law gave the business agent authority to appoint job stewards as the on-site eyes of the agent. The rules were later altered so that the first journeyman on a job acted as steward. Once three carpenters were hired, they elected one to serve for the duration of the project. The Worcester system was a slight variation on the same theme. The first carpenter automatically became steward. In case a group of men arrived together at the beginning of construction, the one with seniority of union membership took the post. They were working carpenters but they had additional union-related responsibilities. The steward checked dues books to ensure payments were up to date. In addition, he reported any infraction of union rules. Though he lacked the power to call walkouts unilaterally, the steward’s observations determined many of the business agent’s actions. Inevitably, aggressive stewards ran the risk of alienating their employers. In order to protect job security and ensure militance, local by-laws often required that “union men must stand by the steward in the performance of his duties.”¹³

This system of justice and enforcement served as a code of ethics for union carpenters. Sharing a job site with nonunion men was wrong, pure and simple. From a strictly pragmatic perspective, nonunion workers threatened union members’ security and wage levels. But more than that, men who never entered the union halls stood outside the community of union values. Similarly, members who chose to be pace-setters, pushers, or pieceworkers rejected, by their very actions, the culture of solidarity and cooperation that supported the framework of unionism. The system’s charges, hearings, and fines had two purposes. They punished the guilty and symbolically reminded the membership of their shared principles. For those reasons, the process was taken seriously. Hearings on charges were formal in tone and afforded violators the opportunity to defend themselves. Few contested the accuracy of the charges, and even fewer contested the underlying basis of the rules. Fines were paid and life went on. But as with every system of justice, allowances were made and rules were bent if necessary. Sometimes the exceptions were even written into the laws, as in the issuance of privilege cards to “aged and crippled brothers” who were exempted from the ordinarily absolute rules governing minimum standard wages.¹⁴

The union culture extended to the broader labor movement. An active labor press articulated the labor creed and kept union members informed of current events. The Labor News, begun in 1906 by union typographers on strike at the Worcester Telegram, was widely read until its demise in 1972. Frank Foster started Boston’s Labor Leader in 1887, somewhat before the Lynn Central Labor Union issued the Lynn Union Leader. The Labor Advocate appeared in Springfield from 1917–1920. Beyond the general labor press, the Springfield and Greenfield Carpenters Union locals subscribed to the craft-oriented Artisan for their members.

The press covered local union news and national affairs of interest to the labor movement. At its best, the information cemented the ties that bound workers in different unions together. These bonds were particularly significant for construction workers, men who were drawn together by similar levels of skill and common work sites but separated by different employers and labor organizations. Their relationships had always been tense and intense. Workers of the varying building trades walked a tightrope with one another, dancing from selfless cooperation to extreme competition.

The pinnacle of cooperation was, of course, the sympathy strike. In these strikes, one set of tradesmen respected the other’s protest, walking off a job site even if they had no grievance with their own employer. Sympathetic actions usually forced an employer’s hand more quickly than isolated strikes by individual crafts. The disappearance of any one trade from a project slowed progress gradually. A combined walkout of a number of trades brought construction to a complete halt. In an 1898 study, Fred Hall discovered that sympathetic strikes occurred more often in building than in any other industry.¹⁵ Common social backgrounds, skill levels, and work sites strengthened cross-trade unity in construction. As a result, building contractors could rarely use the kind of divisive antilabor strategies common in other settings, such as harping on skill, nationality, or race differences. On the contrary, cultural similarities made the obviously effective sympathy strike easier for building trades workers to carry out.

Builders detested the sympathy strike. They wanted, above all, uninterrupted production. Resolving conflicts with their own employees was difficult enough without having to pay the price for someone else’s dispute. The threat of sympathetic action pushed the Boston MBA to back off its harsh antiunionism and institute trade-by-trade arbitration committees in 1893. Apparently, the issue was sufficiently important to warrant major compromise. MBA spokesmen recognized that organizing administrative bodies by craft rather than cross-industry substantially weakened employer leverage. However, they considered the pledges to outlaw sympathy strikes worth the concession. The 1902 agreement between the United Carpenters Council and the Master Carpenters continued the ban on strikes, requiring all disagreements to be resolved by arbitration.

Nonetheless, Boston contractors never completely wiped out the sympathy strike. In June 1907, a group of carpenters won a two-week strike after they refused to work with materials from a mill that was on strike. One month later, fifty carpenters, masons, bricklayers, and hod carriers convinced a subcontractor to replace his nonunion workers after a five-day walkout. In 1912, 252 carpenters, plasterers, bricklayers, metal lathers, and hod carriers supported a steamfitters’ jurisdictional claim in an eight-day walkout; twenty-seven carpenters staged a one-day strike to protest nonunion bricklayers; and eleven carpenters, plumbers, and electricians left their jobs rather than work with nonunion painters. In all three cases, the supportive actions led to the correction of the problems.¹⁶

Outside of Boston, sympathy strikes were less successful though just as frequent. The Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labor reported six sympathy strikes involving carpenters outside the capital city between 1909 and 1912. There was no particular pattern. The towns and the projects varied in size. The trades under siege included bricklayers, electricians, painters, plumbers, and laborers. Each walkout failed and the strikers found jobs elsewhere. Yet the principle remained intact. If one trade was threatened—particularly by nonunion workers—other trades provided support on request. This was as true in open-shop Worcester as in closed-shop Boston. In 1914 and again in 1915, Worcester carpenters struck major building sites over the presence of electricians employed by nonunion Coughlin Electric.¹⁷

Sometimes, the very possibility of a sympathetic strike carried as much weight as the action itself. For a period, carpenters locals in various parts of the country respected agreements with bricklayers, masons, and plasterers under which no one trade could work if any of the others had a current grievance with an employer. The pacts were respected in Massachusetts. The Springfield locals went one step further—the understanding extended to the Building Trades Council and the Central Labor Union. Thus, if any one of the four trades chose to strike, the entire organized workforce of the city would walk out in sympathy. The details of the pact were public knowledge. Many observers credited the successful building trades negotiations of 1914 to the widespread contractor fear of precipitating a general strike.¹⁸

Relations between the craft unions had a nastier, warring side. The sympathetic shows of solidarity may have enraged builders, but the constant jurisdictional fights between trades baffled and infuriated the general public. The sheer volume of construction activity silenced by workers locked in mortal combat over seemingly trivial work assignments has prompted more antiunion sentiment over the years than any other aspect of the industry. Battles have raged between craft unions, between building and industrial unions, and between locals of the same union. Trades regularly crossed each other’s picket lines or refused to work alongside craftsmen from another union if a jurisdictional battle had not been resolved. The ludicrous sight of fellow unionists bringing employers to their knees over internal conflicts led members of the Industrial Workers of the World and other labor radicals to label building trades unionists “union scabs.” No other struggle in the field has produced the passion and rancor of these jurisdictional disputes.

The vast majority of jurisdictional conflicts stemmed from competing claims over new materials, new machinery, or changing construction methods. With every craft in a state of perpetual flux and every craftsman fearing for his future, each innovation represented a potential minefield of lost job opportunities. As the twentieth century ushered in a new wave of technological changes in construction, the jurisdictional battlefront heated up. Bricklayers fought with stonemasons over installation of terra cotta blocks, plumbers and steamfitters argued over which pipes belonged to which trade, and carpenters fought with everyone.

UBCJA officials portrayed themselves as besieged on every front. The trend of metal replacing wood created conflicts with the Ironworkers and the Sheet Metal Workers and the introduction of concrete prompted scraps with the laborers. But more than job security was at stake. The rapidly growing number of jurisdictional strikes owed as much to the prevailing ideological winds inside the unions as it did to a commitment to job protection. Under McGuire, the national policies of the Carpenters Union generally discouraged competition between trades. McGuire was not reluctant to take on other unions, though he usually focused on those organizing carpenters, such as the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners, the United Order of Carpenters, and the Knights of Labor. McGuire reasoned that carpenters would achieve optimal power in a single organization and he relentlessly pursued this objective. He did not live to see it reached, but all the other organizations of carpenters had either faded away or joined the United Brotherhood by World War I.

However, McGuire condemned jurisdictional quarrels with other AFL unions. He advocated the general organization of the workforce and the growth of the trade union movement above and beyond the gains of a particular AFL affiliate. As the ranks of the UBC swelled in the 1890s, this catholic perspective put him in conflict with a growing number of other union officers whose sole concern was the fate of the Brotherhood. The most pressing controversy was with the Amalgamated Wood Workers, an AFL union chartered to organize mill hands in the country’s woodworking factories. Though the UBC had nominal jurisdiction over mill workers, the union had given them halfhearted attention. At first, McGuire resented the AWW’s muscling in on Brotherhood turf. He soon dropped his opposition, recognizing the industrial union’s superior organizing efforts.

Others were less charitable. Pressure mounted on McGuire to renounce his fraternal attitude through the second half of the 1890s. When he refused to reconsider, a struggle for succession began. Though differences over jurisdictional policies were not the only reasons for McGuire’s ouster from office in 1901, William Huber and Frank Duffy, the Brotherhood’s new leaders, gave quick evidence of changed official attitudes at the annual AFL convention later that year. Delegates from the Brotherhood attacked the Electricians, Ship Carpenters, and Painters and Paperhangers, as well as their long-time foes, the Amalgamated Wood Workers and the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners. The national office unleashed pent-up hostilities at the local level. Free to pursue empire-building strategies, UBC unions across the country launched a series of jurisdictional strikes and raids. The national union laid claim to a variety of construction tasks that had never before been considered part of the carpenter’s job. In 1886, the UBCJA constitution described a potential member as a carpenter, joiner, stair builder, cabinetmaker, millwright, or factory woodworker; in 1919, the equivalent jurisdictional definition took five thousand words. Evaluating the impact of the Duffy–Huber regime, Charles F. Reilly, head of the United Order of Box Makers and Sawyers of America, sarcastically commented: “It’s a wonder that they do not claim the earth.”¹⁹

Naturally, aggressive jurisdictional schemes in any one union led to parallel plans of action in other unions. Jurisdictional wars became as familiar a part of twentieth-century construction sites as overalls and tool chests. Conflicts between trades over work assignments were so routine that the secretary of the Boston Building Trades Council wondered if some of the claims should even be given serious consideration. “The general practice of the national union,” he observed, “is to claim all in sight for safety’s sake.”²⁰ Building employers chafed at their lack of influence over the feuding unions. Occasionally, contractors hinted at a willingness to accept the vastly increased power of an amalgamated construction union of all trades in order to eliminate jurisdictional disputes.

In the blueprints for the State Mutual Building in Boston, the architect specified metal door bucks (frames) throughout the structure. At the time (1914), carpenters and ironworkers were contesting installation of the recently designed metal bucks. When the contractor, Norcross Brothers, awarded the work to the ironworkers, the carpenters on the site walked off in protest. Within days the other four hundred tradesmen ran out of work. Norcross informed both unions it would gladly abide by any decision they made. But in this case, employer flexibility meant nothing. The locals were unable to come to an agreement. Representatives from the respective Internationals arrived and hammered out a proposal in which a composite crew of seven carpenters and seven ironworkers handled the bucks. But jurisdictional wars were rarely that simple; Boston Carpenters’ officials rejected the compromise.

In the meantime, Norcross was frantic. The initial walkout occurred on February 20 and no solution was in sight a month later. On March 20, state arbitrator Charles Wood wrote in frustration to AFL head Samuel Gompers:

The contractor is between two fires. He is unable to complete the building under construction for the reason that if he gives the work to the ironworkers the carpenters say they will go on strike, taking with them such trades as are allied to them, and if the carpenters erect the bucks the ironworkers will go on strike, carrying with them the trades affiliated by alliance. If the work is performed by non-union men, a strike would probably follow by all trades.

Finally on March 25, the carpenters agreed to the composite crew. Three days later, C. L. Covington of Norcross advised the arbitrator that nearly all the bucks had been erected.²¹

The jurisdictional wars in construction drew scathing denunciations from contractors, the general public, and other trade unionists. The conflicts grew out of one aspect of building trades craft unionism—the narrow focus on the exclusive interests of the particular trade’s membership regardless of the consequences. But contrary to popular perceptions of the Carpenters and other construction unions, the predominant expression of pre–World War I building trades craft unionism on the local level was not the desire for a separate room in the House of Labor, but rather extensive demonstrations of solidarity. The ever-present sympathy strike, the leadership roles in Central Labor Unions, the pride in the statewide Labor Day celebrations, and the regular presentation of cultural and educational events for the entire labor movement are testimony to the culture of cooperation that characterized carpenters’ unions in Massachusetts.

But a more useful way of understanding these actions is not whether some of them were “good” or “bad,” but that all of them were consistent with the carpenters’ choice for a union culture. The union raised the image of the carpenter to a lofty status, as a proud, “manly,” independent, and even special worker with a right to be treated with dignity and respect. To the extent that that ethic coincided with the interests of the larger labor movement and the working class a whole, carpenters were exceedingly generous in their gestures of cooperation and solidarity. If, on the other hand, someone threatened to interfere with their explicitly demarcated sense of rights and duties—be it an employer, another building trades union, or a radical industrial unionist—the carpenters’ organizations could be unremittingly hostile and vindictive. Individualism and cooperation marched side by side comfortably within the carpenters’ union halls.